


Luminous Flux

by SouthSideStory



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Pregnancy, Rating May Change, Reylo Drabbles, Tags May Change, Unplanned Pregnancy, Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-02-18 19:15:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13106757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: Rey wanted to say yes, to take his hand. Kylo could feel the truth rippling through their bond, her desire like a stone skipping across water.(A drabble collection for the Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's TLJ Flash Fic Challenge.)





	1. The Kingmaker

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings, tags, and rating may change as I add drabbles, so please keep an eye out for that!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "throne"

-

-

Rey wanted to say yes, to take his hand. Kylo could feel the truth rippling through their bond, her desire like a stone skipping across water.

“Please,” he said, lowering himself for the sake of something like love.

Then he felt it: the moment her heart changed, shirking passion in favor of responsibility, giving way to duty-bound light.

Kylo strode forward, stealing the small space between them. Rey was tall for a girl, but still so much shorter than him that he had to bow to kiss her. She made a soft, startled noise against his mouth, even though she couldn’t be surprised. Their connection had stripped away every secret they’d buried.

Rey smelled like lake water and tasted like some sweet warmth he couldn’t name. She kissed back, if barely, an awkward closed-mouthed thing even clumsier than his wet mouth on hers. Kylo yanked at her hair, and she opened to him, more a gasp than a kiss. He broke it and fell to his knees, pressing his forehead to her belly.

“Stay,” he said. “Don’t go.”

She whispered, “I can’t. You know I can’t. I have to--”

Kylo unwound her belt from around her waist, then tugged at her pants. If she wouldn’t have him, he could at least take _this_ , sate the basest of his needs for Rey.

“Please,” he said again, and this time she weakened.

They were wearing too many clothes, and when they came together they were both still half dressed--Kylo shirtless, pants around his knees; Rey naked from the waist down. They didn’t have time for niceties, and his patience with her had worn thin anyway. She was going to leave him, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it as he took her. How this pretty creature had fooled him, made him believe she was different, when really she was just like all the others who’d betrayed and abandoned him.

Their bodies rocked together, as in sync as their minds were, so well matched despite their differences. Dark and light, hard and soft, need and want. The world was ablaze around them, strangling smoke and firefly embers, burning down everything.

-

-

He woke alone, shirtless and cold in a room that was falling apart. After they’d made love, Rey had apparently knocked him out with the Force, taken his grandfather’s lightsaber, and left him here. She hadn’t killed him, at least, so maybe this hadn’t all been a ruse to get away.

He pulled on his tunic, straightened his clothes, and stood. The _Supremacy_ was a broken thing, split to the bone like Kylo. It was long past time to leave.

Snoke lay in pieces around the throne, his remains so undignified that Kylo felt ashamed for having feared him all his life. His master had been strong in the Force, but he was only twisted flesh in the end, destined for ash.

Kylo looked on all that he’d given up, that he’d killed for the sake of a new beginning, and found no peace or purpose in it. Only emptiness, because the one he’d sacrificed it for wouldn’t have him.

He kicked aside the last pieces of the Supreme Leader and took a seat upon the throne. This he hadn’t inherited or been forced into. This, if nothing else, he’d taken for himself.

-

-


	2. A Pauper's Grave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "Jakku"

-

-

Jakku hadn’t changed a bit. It was all as Rey remembered: the sun just as searing, the air as dry, the people as selfish and desperate. The galaxy’s garbage bin, where junk was left to rot.

She found her parents’ grave on the outskirts of town, so close to the place where she’d spent years bargaining for her daily bread, waiting for a family already laid to rest. Rey remembered coming here once when she was five or six, just a few days after her parents had sold her to Unkar Plutt. She’d buried it down, deeper than the single grave that held their bodies.

The spot was marked by a stripped down cruiser’s battery. It had been so heavy to her childish arms that she’d been forced to beg an older scavenger to carry it for her. It was a miracle that the shifting sands hadn’t dislodged it.

Rey sat, legs crossed, and pressed her bare hands to the ground. _Breathe,_ Luke would have told her. _Just breathe._

She could feel the decay below the earth, bones stripped of flesh toward no purpose. This wasn’t Ahch-To; her parents’ bodies had never fed new life.

They’d been weak people with rough lives who had loved neither her nor each other. _Your parents threw you away like garbage_ , Ben had said. A nasty thing to toss in her face, and all the more bitter to swallow because it was true.

Rey spent that night in her AT-AT. (A foul-mouthed Twi’lek had taken it for himself, but one swing of her lightsaber near his lekku had the bastard running off.) She could have slept aboard the _Falcon_ , or better yet taken it back to base, but she didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready to leave. Maybe she’d never been ready to leave.

Her hammock was gone, but the Twi’lek had put together a pallet of musty blankets and flight seat cushions. Rey clutched her doll to her chest, looking up at the wall defaced with thousands of tally marks. Each one commemorating a day passed on this desert hell, wasted waiting on people who were here all along, dead and buried.

Rey didn’t cry. She’d shed enough tears for a family who had undoubtedly shed none on her.

She was half asleep when she felt the world slow down, her crippled walker hushed to an unnatural silence. And then Ben was there, lying right beside her.

He stared at her with hungry eyes, mouth trembling with want and anger.

“No wonder you wore a mask,” Rey said. “Everything you think shows on your face.”

Ben sat up and snarled, baring his uneven teeth. Rey looked up at him, frozen under the weight of his fury.

“I should be the angry one. It didn’t have to be this way, Ben.”

He laughed, a sound so sharp that it could cut her from across the stars. “No, it didn’t. You could have come with me, ruled with me. And instead you’re doing--what, trying to build a rebellion out of one ship full of fighters?”

Rey didn’t answer, although his assessment was spot on and he had to know it.

Then he softened, settling back to the calm she’d learned to expect from him in the quiet moments when the Force connected them. It was strange, how even keeled he could be with her when the rest of the world only ever saw his rage, as unbridled as an animal’s.

“What do you want?” Rey asked. “You know I won’t join you.”

Ben’s gaze swept over her, taking her in, and Rey felt suddenly exposed. She could be his prey, lying on her back like this; she could be his lover.

He reached for her, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. Rey closed her eyes, a shudder rippling over her body. They’d touched so little since they met that it always felt precious, even when it was only the ghost of him that laid hands on her.

“Come back to me,” he whispered. “Please.”

Ben cupped her cheek now, and Rey clenched her jaw to keep from making some small, pitiful noise. It felt so good to make him beg, to break this powerful man over his need for her--but it was growing so hard to deny him, more difficult every time he asked. Rey leaned into his touch, stealing what comfort she could while he was here. The Force wouldn’t allow them much more time. She could already feel their connection slipping away, the noise of the real world invading this sacred space.

Rey couldn’t give in, but she could give him something.

“I miss you,” she said.

Ben looked down at her, his vulnerable lips parting, but she’d never know what he was going to say, because then he was gone.

Rey held her doll tighter. She’d almost forgotten the principal law of this world, the one that ruled every day of her childhood: the desert only took, never gave.

-

-


	3. Born in the Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "legacy"

-

-

When Luke told him about the death and rebirth of Anakin Skywalker, he said that the path to redemption was a narrow one. Ben hadn’t understood what he meant at the time, but now he did. There was so much room to fall to the dark and so little to walk in the light. To make it, you had to step with the greatest care and caution.

These things had never come naturally to Ben, but he was learning.

-

-

His mother told him that the first year would be the hardest.

“That’s how grief works,” she said, and Ben supposed that Leia Organa would know better than anyone.

The war kept him busy—kept all of them busy—and Ben lived in fear of the quiet moments. The snatches of soft silence between conversations, the still of dark nights. That’s when regret slithered close, settling down for a long visit.

He grieved for his father the most, but there were other losses that weighed on him too, ones that his mother and Rey would be disgusted to hear about. He missed the confines of his servitude to Snoke, the simplicity of being a tool at his master’s disposal. He missed leaning into the darkness, hurting others and hurting himself.

The desires that Snoke had encouraged in him were still present, inclinations toward cruelty and anger, and now Ben had no way to exercise them. Not without losing the only place he had left—by Rey’s side.

-

-

There was once so much purpose in every step he took. He wondered what had happened to that purpose. Maybe he’d killed it on a narrow bridge, watched it fall into the mist with his father.

-

-

He woke Rey in the middle of the night, nearly knocked her out of bed with his thrashing. She soothed him, pressing soft kisses to his brow, rocking him like a child. Ben was so much larger than her that it felt ridiculous, but so sweet that he couldn’t pull away.

“You’re not alone,” Rey murmured. “You’re with me.”

Ben nuzzled her throat, nibbled her collarbone, mouthed his way to her breast with wet, messy kisses. He didn’t want to think. He wanted to feel, to lose himself in the loving warmth of his wife’s body.

“Do you want to—to talk about it?” Rey asked, breathless.

“No.”

There was nothing to talk about, just more of the same. Nightmares about all the people he’d killed, the pain he’d suffered, the gentle goodbye touch of his father’s hand on his cheek.

Rey nodded, then pulled him in for a kiss.

-

-

The first year was half over before Ben finally found the courage to apologize to his mother. He knelt at her feet, making himself as small as he felt, and choked on a hundred attempts to say _I’m sorry._ She petted his hair, the way she’d done when he was very young, before he’d been sent to train with Luke. She didn’t say she forgave him, and Ben was thankful.

-

-

The Resistance hated and feared him even more than the First Order had. Ben didn’t let it bother him. He’d given these people good reason to hate, to fear, and he knew all too well how difficult it was to shake the darkness.

“Give it time,” Rey said, again and again. “Without you, we’d be losing this war, and they know that.”

Debt didn’t necessarily breed gratitude, and Rey knew as much, but he let her spin her pretty tales just the same. She’d always been good at lying to herself, and Ben didn’t have the energy to disillusion her this time.

-

-

The first anniversary of his father’s death—of the Republic’s death—was coming to a close when they defeated the First Order. Hux was executed, and most of the other high officers were imprisoned for life.

_Collaborator. Traitor. Coward. Murderer. Monster._ Everyone had a name for him these days.

Ben knew that he belonged on an executioner’s block, just like Hux, but it seemed that the Force disagreed. Maybe there was a reason for that.

-

-

“What turned you back to the light?” Luke asked him.

Ben and his uncle rarely spoke, and Luke always seemed to find him when he wanted company the least.

“I don’t give it much thought,” Ben lied.

“But if you did,” Luke insisted. “What would you say?”

He remembered that throne room, the red all around, and Rey—his Rey—caught in Snoke’s hold.

“Love,” Ben said, giving the truth now. “Love brought me back.”

Luke laughed, a harsh sound deep with a strange, joyful sorrow. “Your mother and I, we always worried that you had too much of your grandfather in you, and you do. You do.”

-

-


	4. Refractions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "mirror"

-

-

**0**

**NOBODY**

She was here, in the middle of a line of Reys, beyond counting but not endless. One, a hundred, a thousand, more. Each version of her full of possibilities: this Rey could be a great Jedi’s daughter, that one a Resistance fighter’s, the one behind her back the child of a Sith.

She stood among so many, and yet she was alone.

“Show me my parents,” Rey whispered.

_Show me who I am_ , she may as well have said.

The mirror revealed two ghostly figures, their images clouded. They disappeared before she could see their faces, gone in an instant. Rey saw only her own reflection now, and in it she found her answer.

Her parents were nobody, and so was she.

-

-

**1**

**SKYWALKER**

When Rey arrived on Ahch-To, she was pulled into the arms of a father she never expected to have. Luke clung to her and cried, called her by a childish nickname and held her close, like he was afraid to ever let her go again.

“My girl,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got my girl back.”

And he did, but only for a little while. By week’s end, he’d sacrificed himself on the salt flats of Crait, died watching a binary sunset on Ahch-To.

Rey gained a father only to lose him within days, and it was all because, when the moment came to leave the _Supremacy_ , she couldn’t end Ben Solo. He was her enemy, her cousin, her equal, her opposite.

And there was something else that she couldn’t put her finger on, an affinity with Ben that kept her from killing him when she could have.

Rey wouldn’t make that mistake again.

-

-

**2**

**PALPATINE**

Rey cried when she learned the truth: that the parents she’d idealized and waited for had been imperial scum. Her mother was a scientist who’d worked on the Death Star, and her father was Emperor Palpatine’s bastard. Both were dedicated to their cause, and when their world crumbled, they’d left behind an inconvenient daughter on Jakku.

It was Ben Solo who helped her find her way.

“Let the past die,” he said. “Kill it if you have to.”

Rey didn’t know what she was meant to be, but it wasn’t a dark sider or a First Order lackey. She wasn’t her parents, and she didn’t have to become them.

-

-

**3**

**SOLO**

Han Solo was a loving husband, but few would accuse him of being a good one, and Rey was proof of that.

He didn’t know who she was when he met her, didn’t even know that she existed. He was ignorant of the truth: that the scavenger woman he’d fucked on Jakku twenty years ago had gotten pregnant, and Rey was the result. She was still trying to figure out how to tell him when Kylo Ren--stars, her _brother_ \--took the matter out of her hands.

Later, in the forest, she said, “You’re a monster,” and meant every word.

He’d murdered the only thing she’d ever wanted, and when she faced him with a lightsaber in hand, their kinship didn’t save him.

-

-

**4**

**KENOBI**

The voice she’d heard in her vision had belonged to her grandfather, Obi-Wan Kenobi. By all accounts, he’d been a good man and a great Jedi, and Rey was proud to have his blood running through her veins.

On a dark night years after the war, and two weeks after her wedding, Rey said to Ben, “Maybe that’s why I picked up the Force so quickly. Because I’m a Kenobi.”

He pulled her closer, kissed her forehead, and said, “No, sweetheart. Your strength is your own.”

-

-

**0**

**NOBODY**

**(again)**

“You’re nothing.”

For a heartbeat Ben had reached inside her, grasped her greatest shame and exposed it.

Then he said, “But not to me.”

And suddenly it didn’t matter that she was Rey of Jakku, no one from nowhere, because here in this moment, she was someone to Ben.

-

-


	5. After Sunrise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "the light"
> 
> Content warnings for pregnancy and discussion of abortion.

-

-

**Seven**

Rey names the baby after Ben's grandmother. Leia spoke so beautifully of Breha Organa throughout her pregnancy that it seems an honor to name her daughter after such a woman. And it’s a balm to something wounded in her heart that, even though Ben can't be here to raise his child, she can give something of him to their little girl.

-

-

**One**

Rey holds on to Ben as he takes her. It hurts a little, but not enough to overcome the pleasure. He goes slowly, and that’s what takes her breath away: finding such unexpected gentleness from this cruel man.

“I’m yours,” he whispers.

Rey moans, cries, grips his strong shoulders as he pumps between her legs, taking her higher, higher, until it feels like she’s touching stars. He comes three thrusts after her with a strangled cry that could be her name.

She leaves before sunrise.

-

-

**Two**

The test’s results are easy enough to read: she’s pregnant, two weeks along.

It was a risk Rey had been willing to take the moment she let herself fall into bed with Ben, and now here she is. A Jedi carrying the Supreme Leader’s child.

In another life, one where Kylo had chosen her over a throne, she could keep this baby. But in this moment her choices are barely choices at all.

-

-

**Three**

The next time she sees Ben, she doesn’t tell him about her appointment with Doctor Kalonia, but he figures it out anyway.

“I can feel her. A light, small but there,” he says. “Were you going to tell me?”

Rey can’t look at him. “I’m not keeping it, so I didn’t see the point in saying anything.”

The muscle beneath his lip twitches, a vulnerable tell that she loves. “Please. Don’t do that, sweetheart.”

Rey wants to explain, but the connection between them closes before she can find the words.

-

-

**Four**

Rey’s appointment comes and goes. She stays in bed all day, hand on her flat stomach, wishing she had the strength to see Doctor Kalonia, but she doesn’t. She can’t let go of this child, the little light growing in her belly, not when she thinks about the love that put her there.

-

-

**Five**

She’s horribly sick through her first quarter and curses Ben Solo for it every day. Not the baby, though. Her baby can do no wrong, even when she’s making her mother miserable.

When she starts to show, the Force brings Ben to her more often. It’s a small kindness, giving them moments together away from the world, where he can act like a true father. He puts his ear to her stomach and smiles when their baby kicks him. A true smile, bright and happy, the likes of which Rey has never seen before.

-

-

**Six**

Labor is hell, but it’s worth it to have her baby in her arms at last, a sweet gift to be held rather than a weight riding inside her belly.

She sees Ben in the corner, eyes overwet, unable to touch their daughter, just a phantom in the Force.

“Come here,” she whispers.

He shakes his head and says, “I can’t.”

-

-

**Eight**

But he does, two days later.

It’s all over the news: the Supreme Leader abandoned his throne and sabotaged his own fleet, taking out half the First Order’s star destroyers in his escape.

His ship lands at the Resistance base six hours later, and Rey realizes that he’s known their location all along. He knew, and he let them live.

They sleep together in the same bed for the first time, Breha in her cradle just a few feet away. She wakes them with her crying twice, but Ben doesn’t mind. He takes care of her while Rey rests.

And in the morning, as the sunlight shines silver and bright through the gap in the curtains, Rey finally gives him the truth.

“I’m yours too.”

-

-


End file.
